Better Things for Better Living Through Chemistry?

"Utopians think that science can transform the Atlantic Ocean into lemonade," snorted Karl Marx's coworker, Friedrich Engels. Yet who should be serving up lemonade last week than that old realist Nikita Khrushchev. In the Kremlin's marble-hailed Palace of the Congresses, addressing the Communist Party Central Committee and more than 5,000 other comrades, Nikita promised that one great force would miraculously straighten out the Soviet economic mess: Big Chemistry.

Between 1964 and 1970, Khrushchev announced, the regime will spend $46 billion to expand the Soviet chemical industry--about the same amount that now goes annually into all domestic economic development. Where would the additional money come from? Khrushchev hinted at a radical reduction in military spending. More important, he admitted that Russia would need credit and supplies, including entire factories, from the West--but not, he fumed, at "fabulous profits" to the capitalists.

Brave Talk. Plans call for building 200 new plants and modernizing 500 old ones; since much of the new production will be plastics and synthetic fibers, Soviet citizens may at last find it easier to buy such simple items as nylon stockings and linoleum flooring.

"For the first time in all the 46 years of Soviet power," said Nikita in a remarkable confession, the party and the state can do something about "satisfying the requirements of the people." Moreover, new products must show better design, because it is "no longer possible to tolerate" Russian consumer goods that "look less smart than foreign articles." An even more urgent task for Big Chemistry is the production of chemical fertilizer. Its output, promised Khrushchev, would be quadrupled from 20 million tons this year to 80 million tons by 1970. This would permit Russia to catch up with the U.S., for U.S. farm surpluses are not the result of any "special American wisdom," Khrushchev insisted; it is just that the U.S. uses almost twice as much fertilizer as the Soviet Union on about half the acreage. Through all this brave talk ran the admission of Russia's disastrous agricultural failures. One arresting figure: although acreage increased 7% since last year, yield actually dropped 20%.

If anyone was inclined to criticize this failure, or the costly palliative of buying grain from the West, Khrushchev had the standard answer: remember how bad things were under Stalin. In 1947, to earn foreign exchange, Stalin and Molotov actually sold grain abroad while in a number of areas "people had bloated stomachs or even died from lack of food." It was the first time Moscow had admitted that starvation took place in the Soviet Union since the forced collectivization of the early 1930s.

Bulging Warehouses. Following Khrushchev's 4 1/2-hour speech, other Communist bigwigs shook the audience with a series of angry complaints. Most collective farmers do not know the first thing about using chemical fertilizer; the Ukraine is planning a crash program to educate 4,000 "skilled fertilizer appliers." Superphosphate fertilizer arrives at the farms with only 20% of the required chemical nutrients; the rest is worthless ballast that gets lumpy and heavy in the rain. Russia has an impressive 561 soil laboratories, but most of them have only one or two employees and the wrong equipment.

As for the chemical industry itself, managers are still waiting for delivery of equipment designed ten years ago. Some of the products are so ungainly that they pile up unsold in warehouses --for instance, synthetic fur coats, which, complained one speaker, "are so heavy that only well-trained athletes can wear them." Only about 30% of the workers in the industry are engaged in production, while the rest are occupied with maintenance or bureaucratic tasks. Moreover, workers are underpaid and receive only a fraction of the prescribed incentive bonuses.

The matter of personal incentives was clearly the key to the situation, both in industry and agriculture. It is the very nature of collective farming--not the relatively superficial problem of fertilizer production--that accounts for the chronic crisis. As Khrushchev's own figures showed, peasants working on their tiny, private half-acre plots, which comprise less than 1% of the arable land, sell to the state 14% of the country's meat, 30% of the eggs, and raise 65% of the cabbages and potatoes.

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